Five seconds later, they were on either side of the front door, a yellow-painted slab of wood that did not look kickable. Lucas pushed the doorbell and they heard the sound of the bell through sets of louvered windows to the sides of the door. Bob knocked—pounded—twice and then moved closer to the windows and shouted, “U.S. Marshals!”
A man’s voice: “Hold on. I’m comin’.”
Lucas and Bob pulled their pistols and a second later the door cracked open on a chain that looked like it should have been used to pull logs out of the forest. Elliot’s face appeared above the chain. He looked at the vests and asked, “ID?”
Lucas pulled out his ID and flipped it open. Elliot squinted at it, then at Lucas’s face, and then at Bob’s, and said, “Gotta close the door to get the chain off.”
He stepped out of sight and pushed the door most of the way closed. He did something inside, Lucas thought, then the chain rattled off its hooks and Elliot opened the door. He was a large man, brawny, with both muscle and a heavy layer of fat. Blond, blue eyes, broad nose, heavy lips. He was wearing a pink golf shirt, khaki shorts, and sandals.
“What d’you want?”
“This is more of an interview than anything,” Lucas said. “We need to talk.”
Elliot took a step, as if to come out, but Bob put up a finger on his non-gun hand and said, “Inside.”
Elliot backed away and they followed him inside. The house was neatly kept, sparely furnished with a motley collection of chairs and tables. A two-drawer couch table sat to the right of the door, and when they were fully inside, Lucas put his gun away, reached out, and pulled open the closest drawer on the table. Elliot said, “Hey!” but Lucas pulled anyway, and sitting inside, on a copy of Guns & Ammo magazine, was a blue-black .45 auto.
Bob glanced at it and said, “Oh. My. God. A felon with a gun.”
“This is a bad neighborhood,” Elliot said.
“And you’re one of the baddest neighbors in it,” Bob said.
Elliot: “Not by a long way, buddy.”
Lucas could see a kitchen at the back of the house with a breakfast bar and three stools. “Talk in the kitchen,” he said. He lifted the .45 out of drawer, popped the magazine, jacked the slide and a round flipped out, onto the ragged blue carpet. Lucas bent over, picked up the .45 round, shucked all the others out of the magazine and dropped them in the drawer and pushed it shut.
Elliot, backing toward the kitchen, watched him working with the gun. Bob pointed Elliot at one stool, and sat beside him, with Lucas sitting across the breakfast bar, the .45 still in his hand. He took a few seconds to disassemble the gun, then reached back and placed the pieces on the stove.
That done, he said, “Now. Bob and I have been running around town stepping on toes.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Elliot said.
“Well, we have been. We’ve been specifically looking for guys like you, out on parole, or guys we can get for three-strikes offenses. For example, if we were to pull your house apart here, and find a joint . . . well, a joint is a federal offense, even if they don’t believe it here in Miami-Dade.”
“I know that, which is why you wouldn’t find a joint in here,” Elliot said.
“Okay. But you know, the damnedest things turn up with a thorough search, stuff that you might not even think is illegal, but it is,” Lucas said. “I mean, that .45, in the hands of a convicted felon out on parole . . . But we don’t want to go there. Instead, we want to bribe you. Don’t ever tell anyone I said that.”
“What do you got to bribe me with?”
“We’ll get to that. We want the name of the guys who shot three members of the Coast Guard this summer up in Fort Lauderdale.”
Elliot looked from Lucas to Bob, his unnaturally pale brow wrinkled, and he asked, “Why would I know that?”
“We heard you dope importer guys down here cut a deal with some Jersey goombahs not to fuck with them when they dropped a load of heroin off the beach,” Lucas said. “A deal got cut, the dope was dropped, and that led to the shooting. That’s why.”
“I’m not . . . uh . . . Man, why would I even talk with you?”
Bob said, “Because you’re on parole. We weren’t even in the house for five seconds before we found that .45. Your parole officer would send you back to prison for that. Find a joint or a bag of heroin, same thing. Drunk driving, drug paraphernalia, domestic abuse . . . almost anything and you go back inside. No trial, no problem, you’re gone.”
“I needed the gun for self-protection but there ain’t any drugs. Does it look like there’s a woman in here that I’d be abusin’?” It didn’t; there was one La-Z-Boy chair pointed at an oversized television in the living room. “If I was gonna . . .”
Lucas interrupted: “What we’re offering is a deal that would terminate your parole. You’d be done with it. If you got caught with a little dope, you couldn’t automatically be sent back to prison. The government would have to go through the whole bail bond, trial, and conviction route to put you back inside. How much would that be worth to you?”
Elliot stared at Lucas with watery blue eyes too small for his face, his heavy head bobbing a bit, and then he muttered, “Something.”
Bob: “Something?”
Elliot walked out of the kitchen and in a circle around the living room; as he was doing that, a gray tiger-striped cat came out of the back of the house and meowed at him. He picked up the cat and draped it across his shoulders, where it settled in and looked at Lucas with yellow eyes.
Elliot said, “Look. I might be able to help out here. I’m not sure; I’d have to make some calls. But I think so. I won’t give you shit until I talk to somebody who could help on the parole.”
“You got a cell phone number?” Lucas asked.
Of course he did, several of them, he was a drug dealer; but he didn’t say that. He said, “I guess.”
“Give me the number and I’ll set you up with one of the top assistants at the U.S. Attorney’s Office here in Miami. She makes the offer and you either believe her or you don’t.”
Elliot stared at Lucas for a moment, and then said, “Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
Elliot pulled at his heavy bottom lip, peeled the cat off, took it to the front door, let it out, came back, and said, “I’ll talk to her. When?”
“This afternoon, probably. Tomorrow morning if one of you can’t make it. You might want to take your attorney along.”
Elliot snorted. “He’s a good criminal attorney, but if I took him along on this deal, he’ll sell me out in a New York minute. I’d probably get shot on the courthouse steps. Nope. I’ll talk to her by myself. I’ll want some paper with some signatures on it. And I can make it this afternoon.”